I was adding games to the pod thing here and the tune thing wanted to update itself at around 1GB or something ridiculous. It just gets used offline for home entertainment so wifi is off. Still, 1GB is insanely huge, if accurate, to periodically add some free aps.

"I was only nineteen' by Redgum is a song many would know. They also released "Your life's in a data bank at ASIO..." or officially just just titled 'ASIO' (a bit like the FBI) back in 1984 I think it was. 30 years ago.

Anyway, I dislike customer loyalty cards, not only because they delay the checkout process as users scavenge a few pennies worth of points, but because they provide companies with ideal marketing and pricing info, assisting them to determine non-elastic purchasing habits, when you're likely to ovulate or expecting, how many children you have, if you buy 'green' cleaning products etc. Custom marketing is occurring I've since read, based on such data, via text messages.

The growth of internet data mining opportunities has simply expanded and automated a lot of what's been happening for decades now, it seems to me. Ironically, the hero/villain Snowdens, Mannings and Assanges of today have exposed fundamental weaknesses in the matrix and opened a whole new set of questions. Since the perfect market ideology of capitalism seems the dominant paradigm today, me guts tell me that it's a two-way street.

It's Great!:
It levels the playing field. Any poor kid with a Chromebook can search the web, do word processing, accomplish anything any wealthy kid can do on a computer without the need for a high spec computer with lots of ram and storage and a big cpu because the heavy lifting is done in the cloud.

It's Insane!:
It's a NSA wet dream. If people become comfortable storing docs, pics, and sensitive files in the cloud how easy things become for the spies and the crooks. Hackers also can and have been getting info, passwords, email addresses, etc., via info already stored on the cloud. I can hear the governments and the crooks saying: more please!

I use cloud storage because, God forbid, if my house ever went up in flames I'd hate to lose my pics, docs, and music collection. I do local backup and storage, but those are all in my house. I suppose I could rent physical storage somewhere and hope it doesn't burn or get wiped out by a tornado, flood, or something, but I'm paranoid about losing data. Paranoid about spies also, seems a lose-lose situation :(